Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (8 page)

The commerce of the Ch'ien-lung reign can be seen as a sump for
absorbing the increase of labor power. It enabled families with tiny
landholdings to survive by selling the handicraft labor of their women
and children. Yet there is plenty of evidence that neither commercial
expansion nor out-migration could take care of everyone, and that a
certain number of people were entirely forced out of the productive
economy. Their solution was not migration outward, but downward:
into an underclass of beggars. We have no reliable way of gauging
the numbers or proportion of displaced persons in the Prosperous
Age. Devices for registering population di.d riot reach the homeless.
Observers a century later saw plenty of vagrancy, of course, during
the economic crises of the nineteenth century. By contrast, the eighteenth century looked like a golden age.34 Yet, despite the disparity
in numbers, I am struck by the social awareness of vagrancy even in
the r 76os. The question is of particular interest because vagrants of
all sorts, both clergy and lay, were objects of suspicion during the
soulstealing panic.35

The clerical underclass. At the height of the sorcery crisis, an elderly
"Taoist" (tao-shih) named Li Ying was arrested by Chihli authorities
on suspicion of queue-clipping and eventually shipped to the summer
capital at Ch'eng-te for interrogation by the Grand Council.36 His
confession:

I'm from Ting-thou." I'm fifty-six years old. My father, mother, wife
and children are long dead. I've always been a hired laborer. In the
thirty-first year of the Ch'ien-lung reign 11766/671 I'd been working in
Fang-shan County, but I was so poor I couldn't go on, so I decided to
join the clergy (ch'u-chia, lit. "leave the family"). At Yellow-lotus grotto
I became a follower of the Taoist master Fu-yueh. I cut brushwood and
carried water for him. Because the temple was too poor, Fu-yueh
couldn't keep me there. There was a Buddhist monk of the Shih-t'ang
Temple named Kuang-shan (also a Ting-thou man) repairing the
temple. I went there and began to work for him.

Li later heard of the Taoist master Wang Lai-shui, "who always stayed
in his mountain retreat." A disciple took him up to visit the master,
"who was unwilling to accept me, because food was short." While
descending the mountain ten days later, Li fell and broke his leg.
"On the road I met a man called Han Chun-fa who helped me into
the village and took care of me for several months. In the second month of this year, my leg had healed and I left to go begging. In
the seventh month, I got to the area of Hsiao-ching, where His
Excellency the Governor-general was passing by. I went over to have
a look and then I was arrested."38

How extensive was the underclass of marginal clergy? The provincial judge of Szechwan pointed to "increasing numbers" of unemployed men and women who "concealed themselves in Buddhist
establishments," but did not shave their heads. They were known as
"hair-wearing Buddhist practitioners" (tai fa hsiu-hsing). As "neither
clergy nor laity" they lived secretly in monasteries and convents and
"conspired with one another in illegal activities, wasting the assets of
the monasteries. 1139 We can see this as mass pietism or as a spillover
of persons whom the economy could not absorb. In either case,
security-minded officials considered these people a threat. There was,
of course, no reliable way to count them.

Most astonishing, in the light of the Throne's deep suspicions of
the clergy, is how badly the government's system for registering the
clergy (see Chapter 5) had decayed by the 176os. In the view of the
experienced provincial official G'aojin, an imperial relation and governor-general of the Liangkiang provinces, nobody bothered to
assemble accurate information. G'aojin had personally checked the
registers of some of his subordinate counties and found them wildly
discrepant. Not only were aggregate numbers not reported; the licensing system, too, had broken down. According to G'aojin, only 20
or 30 percent of "clergy" now carried ordination certificates. This
was because nobody had enforced the rule that monks and priests
had to report every new disciple (that is, every newly tonsured novice)
to the authorities. The result was alarming: large numbers of people
were masquerading as monks and priests, "and the loyal and treacherous can not be distinguished." Not only were the sangha vows not
observed; "there are even heterodox teachings and evil arts (hsiehshu) being used to delude the simple people, in defiance of the laws. 1140

G'aojin's fears are quite in line with standard official stereotypes
about the clergy, as reflected in the Collected Statutes. But may not
mid-eighteenth-century conditions have lent such anxieties a particular urgency? There were now so many wanderers, wrote G'aojin,
who "privately had themselves shaved" (that is, not through the
orthodox tonsure ritual at monasteries or temples) and who were
entered in no register, that it would constitute a major social disruption to round them all up and force them to return to lay life, as most would have no way to support themselves. G'aojin told his local
subordinates to sweep unregistered clergy into the lists. But this was
mere patchwork, he wrote to the Throne. Instead, he proposed
reviving the practice of reporting registered clergy to the Throne at
year's end, along with general population and harvest figures, thereby
infusing some urgency back into the control system.4' Here was a
social environment in which more people than ever (men like the
"Taoist," Li Ying) were on the roads, without livelihood. The "clergy"
was evidently absorbing myriads of them into socially sanctioned (if
not officially licensed) mendicant lives.

To the bureaucratic mind, wandering beggars of any sort threatened public security. People without homes and families were people
out of control.42 The old methods of registering and controlling the
clergy were no longer enough, wrote Min 0-yuan, provincial treasurer of Hupei, at the height of the queue-clipping crisis.43 There
was now a new threat in the form of thousands of vagrant monks and
priests, some only marginally clerical, who formed a breeding ground
for sedition and lawlessness. The statutory controls were only useful
for settled clergy living within a jurisdiction. But now there were
thousands of "roving clergy" (yu fang seng-tao) who wandered beyond
the law's reach. "They use the excuse of `worshiping at famous mountains' or `looking for masters or friends,' going northward in the
evening and southward at dawn, and their tracks are impossible to
trace." They lodge at temples that are known for putting up such
persons, places they call "hanging your sack" (kua-t'a). There, traitors,
bandits, forgers, and imposters take their ease, "reclining on straw
pallets and drinking the water, borrowing the shade and concealing
themselves." Every year, each province is alerted to arrest several
thousand wanted criminals, but many cannot be found. Most have
adopted clerical dress, dropped out of sight, and moved elsewhere.
That is why "in major cases of sorcery-books and sorcery-tales," there
is invariably a "traitor-monk or heterodox Taoist" in the
background, "deluding good subjects." Because they have no fixed
abode, it is impossible to track them down.

Min's view of the clergy underclass turned on the idea that many
"monks" and "priests" were not "really" clergy at all, but rogues who
took clerical garb to evade the law. Although most clerics caught up
in the queue-clipping panic were indeed not regularly ordained,
many were in that intermediate stratum of tonsured novices, who
will be discussed further in Chapter 5. In any case, they were more like beggars than criminals. Some (like Chii-ch'eng of Hsiao-shan or
Li Ying of Ting-chou) were lone survivors of family tragedies. From
an official point of view, however, any uncontrolled movement of
persons was dangerous. Min now proposed new rules by which no
cleric could be affiliated with a temple or monastery outside his own
jurisdiction, nor could he travel more than thirty miles from such a
place. If he did, officials could arrest and investigate him for "any
criminal activity." Even if no criminality were found, he would be
punished with a beating, according to that marvelous catch-all provision in the Ch'ing Code, "Doing inappropriate things, heavy punishment" (pu-ying [wei], chung; statute 386), and forced to return to lay
life. Temples and monasteries were to send all such wanderers away
and tender a bond to the authorities that none was being harbored.
(The emperor replied, "This matter is worth Our concern." )44

Such warnings struck a sensitive nerve in the royal mind. Hungli's
own suspicion of the Buddhist clergy (as distinct from his ostentatious
patronage of Buddhism as such) was deeply ingrained. It was not
just that monks and their movements were hard for the civil authorities to regulate. Hungli's attitude reflected a more general Confucian
disdain for men who "willingly shaved their heads to become monks
and even failed to care for their parents, wives, and children, and
whose activities are accordingly suspicious," as he expressed himself
on another occasion.45 In this respect, monks were comparable to the
despised eunuchs, who forsook their principal filial obligation, to
have progeny, for the sake of employment.

If Min's description of a floating clerical underclass indicates more
than jangled official nerves, how important a social phenomenon was
it by mid-Ch'ing times? One would predict. that population pressure
had begun to erode the economic base of the lay family in many
areas by the late 176os. Yet we have so little data on the underclass
that, beyond mere poverty, we know nothing systematic about their
social backgrounds. Begging as an alternative to starving, and mendicant clergy as a variety of beggar, are certainly nothing new in the
176os.46 Yet fear of sorcery fed not upon numbers but upon perceptions. In the idiom of bureaucratic control, Min O-yuan was
expressing anxiety about the uncontrolled movement of rootless
people. Was there a popular analogue to this anxiety? If so, it may
well have been expressed in the idiom of sorcery fear. Among the
public, one of several things may have been happening: either fear
of mendicant strangers was growing because there were more of them passing through communities; or public feelings about mendicants were changing, regardless of how many of them there were;
or both. Even without social changes of this sort, fear of strangers
was deeply rooted in popular religion, as I shall explain in Chapter 5.

Lay beggars. Nearly all writers on "beggars" begin by listing the
various "types" of beggars (the blind, the deformed, those who sang
or juggled for the market crowds, the local beggars, and the seasonal
outsiders). Certain traits seem to have been quite conventional (operatic airs sung only by beggars, for example, and the "professional
whine," common to street beggars) .41 It is now quite clear that a
substantial fraction of "clergy" by the i 76os was essentially a variety
of beggar. Clerical dress and behavior signaled a mendicant role that
was publicly familiar and indeed respected, however objectionable it
may have been to officialdom. An eighteenth-century observer points
out that wealthy people who would disdain to give even a penny to
an ordinary beggar would empty their pockets into a monk's begging
bowl in hopes of gaining karma-credit in the afterlife.48 Certainly, lay
beggars bore a social stigma that clergy did not; their mere appearance (disgustingly filthy, hair matted, dressed in rags) contrasted with
the conventionally robed monks.49 Even so, the distinction between
monks and lay beggars was not crystal-clear in the public mind. It
was a long-standing custom in Peking to call ordinary beggars chiaohua-tzu, from mu-hua-a term that originally referred to the religiously sanctioned begging of Buddhist monks.50 Monkhood was
perhaps the most acceptable of a number of specialized, conventional
roles for beggars. We may think of these roles as social templates,
already well established in the eighteenth century, to which increasing
numbers of people could cling as times got harder. That these templates still retained their power to shape behavior is perhaps the
essence of the eighteenth-century condition: those squeezed out by
the economic pressures of Ch'ing society could still find, in the world
of social symbols, acceptable paths to survival. A later age of social
breakdown would find such templates cracking under the pressure
of mass destitution.

To judge from undated evidence of a century or more later (presented by the folklorist Hsu K'o in his invaluable collection of Ch'ing
tales and social vignettes), beggars were well entrenched in various
ecological niches in local society. Some had customary jobs as warrantservers for county authorities. Some had worked out a seasonal
arrangement: beggars from northern Anhwei would collect in towns along the Chekiang-Kiangsu border every winter (the slack season in
their own villages), sustain themselves by begging until spring, then
return home. These seem to have been ordinary peasants who lacked
the by-employments to survive between crop seasons.'' But how
helpful is Hsu K'o's information (some of which must have been from
the late nineteenth century or even later) for understanding eighteenth-century conditions? Even though economic conditions,
crowding, and social breakdown were much worse a century later,
contemporary perceptions of the growth of a clerical underclass
should at least make us watchful for evidence of an actual increase
of mendicancy in general in the mid-eighteenth century.

The discussion of outward migration in Ch'ing times has largely
concerned movement of people into the relatively underpopulated
borders, into interior uplands, and overseas. Because local officials
had to cope with it, and because the state sometimes encouraged it,
such outward migration shows up readily in state documents. The
extent of downward migration-dropping out of the settled occupations into vagrancy and begging-is harder to estimate. It occasionally became part of the documentary record when beggars were
disorderly: in the little Appalachia of Kuang-te, which I mentioned
earlier, the Prosperous Age of mid-Ch'ien-lung times had produced,
by 1767, gangs of "beggar-bandits" (kai fei), who now roamed the
area, taking what they wanted by force and battling constables with
clubs and brickbats. It turned out that ten of the beggars who were
caught had previously been arrested on the same charges in nearby
Hui-thou and Hsiu-ning but had been let off with beatings. Hungli
now ordered stiffer punishments. The economic problems of Kuangte he did not mention at all.52